Why No-Bama Care?

Thursday, October 24, 2013

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While I am strongly in favor of “ObamaCare,” I also strongly feel that the system under which we in California are to register/enroll is a sham.

I have been trying to enroll every day since the opening of registration (October 1) and have been unable to do so. I have spoken to at least six online helpers, each of whom has told me that everything is working, and they don’t understand why I’m having a problem. However no one has gotten back to me with a reason for the problem or a way of fixing it.

As best I can tell (and the online helpers agree), I am properly registered. However, when I choose a plan that is being offered to me and try to enroll in it, I am told (in bright red letters) that I “can’t enroll right now, try again later.”

At least we could be told the truth as to what is going on. Something is rotten in the State of California.

Comments

This only works by:- overcharging young healthy people to subsidize old sick ones.- raising rates overall (currently national average +99% for males and +65% for females).- lowering payments to doctors for same services rendered today which will (and already is) creating a doctor shortage, compounded by lib-dems refusal to adjust medical lawsuit reform.- forcing businesses to pay for obamacare or pay a penalty (in one year from now)- forcing individuals to buy health insurance or pay a penalty for not buying it.

Once you finish signing up, you will be *blown away* by what it will cost you to pay for health insurance (unsubsidized) and delighted to know that obamacare will raise premiums on you, give you a HUGE deductible and your choice of care will be extremely limited - and include 100+ day waits to see specialists.

So all in all, it makes perfect sense for you to keep voting lib-dem, keep supporting obamacare (because it makes you feel better about yourself and you "care" about people) and keep trashing small government, constitutionalists tea party types as nutbags. (my words, not yours).

Yeah, throw out the old sick people so the youth can have cheap insurance. Death panel ? Single payer is the only answer. Insurance is a profit scam whether its private or government run. Healthcare for profit! Let's put the sick people out on the street! great idea.

Government ALWAYS says that if you are having problems with their personnel, software, programs etc, it's always YOUR fault, never the government's.

Of course now that the individual mandate has been delayed, will more sick people or healthy people delay enrollment? Duh!!! Those that have been fantasizing that Obamacare would at least break even are in for a rude awakening. It's going to be a huge sinkhole right out of the gate.

"Remember in 2009 when Sarah Palin warned that Obamacare would lead to “death panels”? People ridiculed her alleged right-wing paranoia; PolitiFact christened her accusation the “Lie of the Year.” In this context, it’s ironic that a recent Slate article admits that socialized medicine goes hand in hand with government death panels. What’s even more disturbing is that the author–Adam Goldenberg–applauds the practice.

Specifically, Goldenberg explains that “Canada Has Death Panels”; this is the very title of his piece. Here’s the news hook:

Last week Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that doctors could not unilaterally ignore a Toronto family’s decision to keep their near-dead husband and father on life support. In the same breath, however, the court also confirmed that, under the laws of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, a group of government-appointed adjudicators could yet overrule the family’s choice. That tribunal, not the family or the doctors, has the ultimate power to pull the plug.

In other words: Canada has death panels.

And yet Goldenberg’s purpose is not to warn Americans to turn back now, lest we follow Canada down this horrifying path. On the contrary, Goldenberg thinks this outcome is just swell:

Perhaps it is easier for Canadians to trust government-appointed panels, rather than judges, with decisions like these. For reasons that arguably go back to our respective foundings, Canadians tend to have more faith in our government and our bureaucratic processes than Americans do in theirs…

[T]he question is no longer whether we can “play God,” but when, how, and who should do so. When humanity demands haste, and justice demands expert knowledge, Ontario’s death panels offer a solution—whatever Sarah Palin says.

And there you have it. Whether or not the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) explicitly details the process, it is unavoidable that more government involvement in health care will lead to bureaucratic decisions concerning the proper use of “society’s” resources. Americans will eventually see that the problems with Obamacare go far beyond website glitches."

Have there been any death panels in Romneycare? Obamacare = Romneycare, written by a good number of the same people. Obamacare = Romneycare = The_Heritage_Foundation_Care (rightwing response to Clintoncare).

Obamacare is based on exchanges where private, non-socialistic healthcare providers, offer a number of different plans where people can choose, allowing competitive capitalist healthcare.

Canada has a single-payer, government funded healthcare system.

Do you know the difference, and that you are comparing apples and oranges.

The roll-out of the Bush Medicare Part D was also rocked with problems. The Goleta Water District changeover to electronic billing has similarly been plagued with problems. The Flickr makeover was beset with bugs. Unfortunately, that is the nature of software and big IT systems.

The difference was that during the Bush Medicare Part D debacle, Democrats did not jump up and down and scream as is going on now with Obamacare.

----- quote fromhttp://ccf.georgetown.edu/all/how-doe...The rollout of the new Medicare drug benefit has been anything but smooth. At a news briefing yesterday, Mark B. McClellan, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, provided a how-to demonstration of the much-awaited Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Finder, which he said would be available on www.medicare.gov by 3 p.m. It wasn’t. … Problem is, the Medicare folks have had some trouble getting the tool up and running. The original debut date was Oct. 13, but officials delayed it, citing the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. Next it was promised on Oct. 17, but that day, too, came and went without personalized plan comparisons being available. Late in the month, McClellan told reporters that the feature definitely would be ready before Nov. 15, the date when seniors can begin signing up for the drug benefit. Yesterday [November 8], McClellan announced that the time had come. … But the tool itself appeared to be in need of fixing yesterday. Visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours. When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly.

http://www.epluribusmedia.org/archive...During the enrollment period for Part D, there was confusion about which prescriptions would be covered by the enormous number of plans from which an enrollee could choose. Variations in implementation from state to state exacerbated the confusion. In addition, some claimed that both the intricacies of choosing a plan and the transition of medical information “overwhelmed the government computers.”

One of the reasons given for this was the fact that there was no beta testing of the actual computer application/system prior to the transition from Medicaid to Part D.

Um the problem is that a lot of people who have health care that were promised by Obama they could keep their plans are getting letters from their insurance companies saying that their plans don't meet qualifications of Obamacare and they have to get new, much more expensive plans.

The theorized result that many think this will lead to would be that eventually you have most of the people on these government plans, which if people are going to realistically be able to afford them after prices skyrocket will have to be subsidized by the taxpayer.

In other words, the failures of the system being put in place will result in more government control of health care.

It doesn't matter if a panel of people are deciding for one person or half a million people, if there is a government panel of people deciding when people live and die, when they receive care and don't, it is a death panel. That means that death panels already exist here in this country under Medicair/aide and conservatives would then be worried that these will expand and become even more universal, which they are under Obamacare. Look in the government plans, the limits and coverages and deductible amounts all represent a death panel. It's much more theoretical than most progressives picture when they hear that term being used.

Technically a private insurance company is a death panel, but conservatives worry about government because government is tyrannical. If you actually have a free market, then you would have competition and prices would go down, service would increase. You can't say a company is unfair in the free market because all that is would be a market opportunity. A company can only be unfair due to a government restriction on their competition. But we don't have a free market in health care at all, or much of anything for that matter except maybe some electronics (which we see prices going down and quality increasing), but in health care it is the exact opposite of a free market, even before Obamacare.

Tabatha - it is *because* of Obamacare mandates that private insurance companies are raising rates. It is also because of Obamacare that private employers are moving full time workers to part time and almost all those cases are against the working poor.

It is also because of Obamacare that service levels will drop, deductibles are going up and options are going down.

Let me get this straight.... We're going to be "gifted" with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don't, which purportedly covers at least ten million more people, without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, who have recently demonstrated their objective and professional integrity; written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a Dumbo (ie: big ears) President who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, for which we'll be taxed for four years before most benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare and the Post Office all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke!!!!!